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The Shepherd and the Star - Part II
The decks of Vahagnae’s elderly and anonymous freighter creaked and whimpered as its frame swerved away from an aged world’s bewildered orbit and was pushed towards an expanse of blackness, opposed to the place of the youthful sun. As the vessel began to build up speed, a rectangle of tiny engines at her rear began to charge up emerald energy similar in substance to the terraforma. The engines launched four beams into each other and a flourish reversed across the ship’s hulking shell, which launched it forwards and into a jade channel of controlled space. This was how humanity intended to explore the universe, through channels of intense green just like this. It was how they had colonised their system, and their means to colonising all else. It was the first step on the tread to perfecting hyperspace travel, and subsequently that meant that it was not flawless. Travel through the use of these engines meant that it still took hours to reach other worlds, but humanity drew comfort from the concept that at least it did not take years anymore as it did for the spaceships of old. The Commander was directed to a cramped room on the aft deck, facing the radiant burn of the muffled engines, where she dropped onto an old sofa and relaxed. Moments where she didn’t have to do anything seemed so precious to her, they were gratifying and let her experience how ordinary people back down on the colonies lived out their lives. It was good. She rested her head, closed her eyes and allowed her thoughts to resume their natural flow, until one of them fell out of the stream and reminded her of what was to come. Another meeting with one of her fellow agents, and another mission for the Agency. Usually that meant that she would have to seal away her humanity, load her pistol and imbed a bullet into some poor outlaw’s skull. For anyone who wasn’t an agent it would be considered murder, which itself implies an intention to break the most valued authoritative code of society, but she was above the law. The Agency was above the law. And everyone, Earth-bound or colonialist except those with the highest military clearance, remained utterly oblivious to it. The truth was that, after the Rapture Wars (most commonly referred to as World War 3), the united governments’ held a secret meeting where the world’s leaders gathered in secret to discuss their plans to avoid further bloodshed. No one knows what exactly was examined as no recording of the meeting was ever made open to the military or any other commanding administration, but one thing became certain. From the talks, the Agency was born. A cluster of webs where genetically enhanced ‘agents’ were produced by nameless firms with joint consent from the world leaders to carry out unsigned tasks for the simple purpose of ‘retaining peaceful relations between all imposing bodies to circumvent a course of carnage and terror’. The creation of the Agency never became public, something that was probably decreed essential during the post-Rapture meeting, and since all agents were chosen at birth and trained during childhood within the prohibited deserted cities beneath the Earth, no one ever grew doubtful or came up with theories that threatened the Agency’s secrecy. Faultless. The Commander did not recall her first mission. She did not remember any that followed for the time that trailed afterwards either, until just recently that was. She had been suffering visions as she slept, and researched it on the VL (virtual library, the huge source of knowledge which evolved from what the primitives called the ‘internet’) and discovered that ordinary people called the experience ‘dreaming’. Agents did not dream. They were almost like machines and consequently without mercy, pity or remorse. It was unacceptable. At least, that’s what her neural implants insisted. She agreed because the AI was always right, and she knew what the ‘dreams’ were a consequence of. She had missed her last NI update, something forbidden for any agent. NI updates provided the agents with renewed information regarding their targets and replaced their outdated AI in the neural implants with new ones, so they were completed controlled. The Commander had missed her last update session because the nameless doctor who usually performs the task was murdered, probably by another agent for some reason or another...The Agency was complex like that. She was also away on her own mission at the time. The odd thing was that she expected to be approached by another agent and taken to another doctor where, ultimately, she would receive another appropriate update. None of these things came to pass, but hopefully that’s why she was being summoned to Solace. Maybe they had discovered that she had fallen through the restraints of their system, and maybe they could fix her. With all of this thinking, it wasn’t long before she drifted off again, and from the bulkheads of her mechanised mind, the dwarfed ideas of a potential human being rushed together and dropped her into her latest delusion. It was one she had been having a lot lately. She had her back to a stack of thick crates at the base of a long narrow hallway with a pistol in her tremulous hands, and it was dark, as if the power of whatever ghostly vessel she was on was at a complete minimal. She looked as though she was not on a mission, her stance wasn’t right, and she was hiding. Usually she only hid for defence, but it looked different. She didn’t want to be found. Her bizarrely heavy breathing was silenced by slow, close footsteps. * ‘I’m ending this, Commander! You’re too much of a fucking risk to the Agency, to democracy! We were both given orders. I follow mine! Commander? Where are you? Commander?!-’ ''The Commander spun out of the shadow of the crates and fired a round, screaming fiercely as she emptied the last of her ammo. Her eyelids split open and her torso dived forward, and she wiped the sweat from her cheeks as her face buried into her hands. She tolerated the burst of emotions for a few seconds, then shut them away at the back of her mind and sat straight. After a moment or two she was the Commander again, an agent and not some normal, common human. * ‘Commander.’ Vahagnae’s voice belted out of the comm. ‘We’ll be arriving at Solace shortly. Get down to the hangar.’ The freighter pulsed back into normal space and the regular engines regained control as the emerald engines each shut down and rested. The decks trembled and groaned faintly as the huge ship twisted and turned to the right with the distant shine of the sun still able to stroke its tired, industrious skin. As it performed a slow curve, a great globe with scarred scarlet skin and thick orange veins spun heavily amidst a veil of small satellites and asteroids. Amongst the net of the universe’s wonders, the ship turned as it drifted forwards calmly with the smallest of the rocks harmlessly bouncing off the shields. It took a few minutes for Europa to emerge from the dense field, and the Commander took a moment to gaze out of the porthole as she stopped on the steps down to the hangar. Europa carried a extensive surface that were sure to be huge craters, cliffs and valleys of ice down on the surface, but from up here she looked like a glass window which had been smacked, fractured and shot at by any thousand of abusive artillery. Yet, she had held herself together. Her persistence to live was probably what attracted Earth’s residents to her in the first place, that and the fact they knew that they could harbour O2 and H2O from her splintered plains. The freighter’s engines stopped just after it performed its final turn, before they reactivated and pushed its entire mass towards the frozen world. The Commander jumped the last step and landed in on the hangar deck with a loud thud, which made several deck chiefs stare up from their work on the large object facing the cargo-door. * ‘You couldn’t just drop me off then, I take it?’ the commander asked shortly upon theorising what it could be. * ‘The captain received word from your contact; the surface base isn’t accessible by any other means, commander. It was abandoned a long time ago. It was made just after the war, y’know, to mine and junk? Why anyone would return to that dump is beyond me.’ One of them re-enforced her theory * ‘We’re just making sure everything on this baby’s functioning okay. If anything goes wrong, well, you’ll know about it.’ * ‘...But I just did one orbital drop already today...’ she muttered quietly so no one could hear, and then heard the speaker fire off a familiar voice. * ‘Okay commander, we’re approaching the drop point. Get geared up and ready to go.’ Vahagnae ordered ‘Solace is at the foot of two large cliffs. Crash into either cliff and it’ll cause them both to drop a heap of ice onto the base, crushing anything inside and yourself in the process.’ * ‘...Doesn’t sound like anything new.’ She slipped her head into her helmet and wired it to her combat suit, then flipped on the oxygen reserve as the engineers finished their last adjustments and began to flood out of the hangar deck, sealing it off behind them via the blast doors. in Part III